Featured Poet

          jennifer   Lagier

	"From the Apple to the Lips" Charles Martin - 1913

	Rehab Commencement You will not miss the crucifix woven of hospital bracelets pinned to the bulletin board over your twin bed. Already you've packed two changes of clothes, the notebook with addresses of outpatient clinics. This is transition, not a banquet, despite the sweets you slice, using a dull knife in the institutional kitchen. Witnesses arrive and are buzzed in through locked doors and guards, heroes and villains you have introduced during raging group sessions. You wheel your 83-year-old father down a yellowed hall to a tired place where the broken and barely-detoxed await your arrival. Your mother passes by convulsing and comatose junkies. You respect their isolate hells, pretend not to notice. This is graduation, you tell yourself, but what you are about to share will be no bright celebration. Relatives are displayed in front row seats, amazing evidence you once had family and job, years without overdosing. After 28 days, you are finally spilling from this womb where you bottomed out, rebuilt, and are now expected to take charge and recover. You practice taking that first shaky step. This is your very last chance. You are no longer flying.                         Low Tide I-Ching Ancient shellfish provide blue hints of primordial stories arranged in iambic pentameter. Disjointed clues imprint fossilized sand. I study dimpled rock, compressed collaborations built from barnacles, past colonies of miniature urchins and crabs. Who will decipher this century's petrified stanza, broken whale vertebrate, tangled driftwood, and tubular kelp? Granite runes tossed ashore by turquoise gambol, form an enigmatic ellipsis for casual divination: silver dash of polished tree, eroded limpet, two crumbling stones.   Sleeping With the Cat Hunger worms its way beneath my skin to unscratchable depths. From night's lonely corners, ghosts of men I have loved come to circle my bed. Unwanted and alone, I cling to chilly pillows, put my hands on myself. Outside, a swollen moon hangs above turgid squash, miles of gaping gold blooms.   Swept Off My Feet by Montaña de Oro Wild spinach falls without a care from the crumbling ledge. The Pacific growls, dislodges sleeping gulls, pounds granite shores with furious fists. I am pulled by siren surf, look down sheer rock, feel that vertigo jerk. Below, turquoise rolls and slams ashore, washes slabs of upended strata. Ancient magma, frozen into white whorls and wrinkles, provides discordant clues, confuses the senses. Uncovered secrets slide to the transient beach. Eroded bluffs avalanche into wildflower canyons. Gravity tugs straying wanderers back to her bosom. I seize wooden guard rails, swaying and weaving. Elemental divisions are erased. Messy evolution leaves me dizzy and reeling. (First appeared in print in Edgar Literary Magazine Winter/Spring 2006)   Beach Cipher Birdsong chatters from the silvery air. Stiff cypresses bear rigid witness to wild radishes with a disregard for boundaries. I am morning's silent intruder, trundling my petty distress and pedestrian worries from kitchen to beach. Bright-eyed sparrows serve as guardian angels. Crows taunt as I toil and flounder in unstable sand dunes that absorb and erase. Sea mist beckons, seduces to the very edge where I dance with spirited surf. Its pounding wash rolls ashore, spills ancient wreckage, offers strange inventory. I seek clues to untangle whatever detains inspiration, keep listening for the sure pound of tidal Morse code, messages from a fluid dimension where unspoken mysteries sleep.

	Jennifer Lagier is a member of the Italian American Writers Association and the National Writers Union, Chapter 7. She has published poetry in a variety of journals, anthologies, and e-zines throughout the U.S. and Italy. Her four previous books are Coyote Dream Cantos (Iota Press, 1992), Where We Grew Up (Small Poetry Press, 1999), Second-Class Citizen (Voices in Italian Americana Folio Series, 2000) and The Mangia Syndrome (Pudding House Publications, 2004). Jennifer teaches at Hartnell College and California State University, Monterey Bay. Contact Jennifer Website

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